Brands and religious labels: a spillover perspective

Abstract

With different religions mixing in many societies, religious consumer groups receive increasing attention as target segments. Trying to appeal to such religious segments, companies differentiate food products by adding religious labels (e.g. kosher or halal) to packaging. But while this makes the products more attractive to the consumers of the focal religion, adding a religious label may also impact the brand evaluation by consumers with no religious beliefs or a different religious orientation. Drawing upon social identity theory to explain the psychological basis of inter-group discrimination, and taking account of information integration theory to analyse how religious labels affect product and brand evaluations, this article aims to assess the spillover effects between religion and brand among consumers who are not part of the religious communities addressed by these labels. The findings indicate that the perception of religious labels on food packaging is influenced by the attitudes towards the religion and the brand, while the relative importance of both antecedents is dependent upon several consumer characteristics. The theoretical and managerial implications of our findings, the limitations of our work and directions for future research are discussed.

Keywords:

• religious labels
• packaging
• cosmopolitanism
• spillover

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully thank Martin Eisend, Stephan Zielke and the 2012 EMAC reviewers and session-participants for their constructive comments on a prior version of this manuscript. The authors furthermore owe a debt of gratitude to the editor and three anonymous reviewers of the Journal of Marketing Management for their valuable feedback on this manuscript. Finally, the authors thank Anna Mann for her help during the data collection.

Notes

¹ According to Merriam-Webster dictionary 2013, the term ‘kosher’ describes selling or serving food ritually fit according to Jewish law.

² ‘Halal’ can be translated as ‘permissible’ and, according to Merriam-Webster dictionary 2013, describes selling or serving food ritually fit according to Islamic law.

³ A detailed codebook was developed in discussions with consumers. It is available from the authors on request.

⁴ We interpret this decrease in brand attitude as spillover effects that are caused by attributes of the product. We tested this assumption by conducting a mediation analysis among the respondents from the control group, in which the attitude towards the product (without religious label) was conceptualised as the mediator in the relationship between the prior and the post attitudes towards the brand. Both a Sobel’s test (b_ind = .157; z = 5.48; p < .001), and a Hayes (2013) bootstrapping procedure based on 5000 re-samples (PROCESS-macro, indirect effect’s 99%-confidence interval does not include zero; c.f. Rauschnabel & Ahuvia, 2014), supported this assumption.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Philipp A. Rauschnabel

Philipp A. Rauschnabel is an assistant professor of Marketing at The University of Michigan – Dearborn, USA. He received his Ph.D. in Marketing from the University of Bamberg in Germany. His research interests include brands and new media. He also consults regularly with, and presents research findings at, various organizations on these topics.

Marc Herz

Marc Herz holds a Ph.D. and is a senior consultant and senior researcher at Kleinundpläcking Markenberatung GmbH, Berlin (Germany), and lecturer in International Marketing at the University of Vienna (Austria), where he received his Ph.D. in Management. His research focuses on country-of-origin, country image, branding and consumer behaviour.

Bodo B. Schlegelmilch

Bodo B. Schlegelmilch is the dean of the WU Executive Academy and Chair of the Institute for International Marketing Management at WU Vienna. Previously, he held professorships in the USA and the UK and also worked for Deutsche Bank and Procter & Gamble.

Bjoern S. Ivens

Bjoern Sven Ivens is a professor of Marketing at Otto-Friedrich-University Bamberg, Germany. His main fields of research are brand management, customer management, and pricing issues. He is co-director of the Competence Center for Digital Business, a joint research group run by Fraunhofer-Institut IIS and Otto-Friedrich-University.